Why Canberra has resisted releasing the data behind the curve

"We don't want to scare the living shit out of everyone" was how one state minister described their attitude to releasing the epidemiological modelling the national cabinet is using to guide the COVID-19 response.

That finally changed on Friday, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would be releasing the modelling after national cabinet meets Tuesday.

Australia's Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy has been at the forefront of the nation's COVID-19 response. Alex Ellinghausen

Federal ministers and officials had until then been resisting the release of the modelling, which a team of Melbourne University academics has been supplying to the almost daily meetings of chief medical officers.

The change in heart belatedly recognises the need to foster trust and instil confidence in the serious and sometimes draconian measures needed to minimise the spread of infection.

It is also a major shift in attitude for the federal government, which has been a laggard when it comes to open data and transparency.

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The push to open up the modelling and the data which supports it was led by NSW, which this week released postcode level data in machine readable format on its open data site for academics, developers and the public to see in fine detail.

The NSW government push was not an accident.

At cabinet level it has a minister, Victor Dominello, who is passionate about the power of data and how it can tap the wisdom of the crowd to gain actionable insights and build support for government action.

As Customer Service Minister, Dominello leads one of two cabinet committees, meaning virtually every measure that goes to cabinet is scrutinised through a customer and digital lens. No other government is Australia has elevated its transformation play to cabinet level.

This in turn has seen the development of major data infrastructure and capability – with Sydney emerging as the epicentre for data anlytics – and with it a maturity in public leadership and data confidence not found elsewhere.

The head of the NSW Data Analytics Centre, Ian Oppermann, is a world leader in data management and using a sophisticated measuring tool has ensured the anonymised data releases are rigorously tested for privacy, security and usage.

Dragging the chain

The contrast with Canberra could not be more stark, reflecting years of obfuscation and hiding behind privacy and security approvals to cover the fear of accidently releasing private information. And leadership worries about how the insights might be used.

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This has been especially so in healthcare where Australia's federal system, together with a very conservative clinical community, has conspired to lock down the data.

States hold hospitalisation data, while the Commonwealth holds the pharmaceutical, primary care and lab data. Only in 2018 did some of that data come together in an integration project the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is overseeing, but according to Professor Tony Blakely, the data is only for government agencies.

Blakely, an epidemiological expert and outspoken critic of the deep secrecy that pervades heath data in Australia, says similar data has been available in New Zealand since the 1990s.

Canberra has been plodding forward with data integration. Ironically, a legislative attempt in the autumn parliamentary sittings to finally go ahead with data sharing has been stymied by the broader government shutdown for all things outside of the coronavirus pandemic.

The resistance to sharing, open data and genuine public participation runs top to bottom in governments across the country, and reflects a classic command-and-control mentality that still pervades our political class and the top end of both federal and state bureaucracies. For better or worse Morrison comes from this mindset, embracing thinking that promotes secrecy over openness.

The push in the Turnbull era to drive innovation through data analysis and evidence saw lots of talk about open data and tentative moves to build out data capacity. It remains a key recommendation of the Thodey public sector reform package that has also gone into the non-corona slow lane.

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But without a cabinet data champion forcing the change, we are likely to see years of slow walking, as risk-averse agency heads – most with little technical or data skills – operate in much the same way governments have for the past 50 years.

NSW takes the lead

To illustrate the difference, NSW has instigated a daily 7.30 am meeting of its data leads chaired by the DAC, to bring together the daily insights from the data dashboards that have been developed over the past few years.

These dashboards give cabinet and ministers a real-time grip on the daily key operational performance of government, as well as information on a variety of important supply chain data such as petrol supply. It also picks up family violence incidents and other social problems, exacerbated by isolation, from across the breadth of government. These insights are directly fed into the Premier's top level daily 9 am COVID-19 meeting.

At a time when crowd control and contact tracing is critical, anonymised telco data from Vodafone is being mixed with Opal travel card data, vehicle movement data and foot traffic entering Service NSW shopfronts to give a fix on the effectiveness of self-isolation measures.

The data is going to be critical in determining how various parts of the economy and society are turned back on. This will almost certainly need a fined-tuned approach, with data able to inform exactly where resources need to be applied and when.

In old-fashioned parlance, it will enable government to put the cops where the crime is – very useful when the whole game is about managing the peak.

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Tom Burton has held senior editorial and publishing roles with The Mandarin, The Sydney Morning Herald and as Canberra bureau chief for The Australian Financial Review. He has worked in government, specialising in the communications sector. He has won three Walkley awards. Connect with Tom on Twitter. Email Tom at tom.burton@afr.com

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